How Glasgow Changed The Face Of Dentistry
THE FUTURE of dentistry has arrived – and it’s tucked away inside a Victorian townhouse in the East End of Glasgow.
Behind the ageing, tiled entrance of number five Annefield Place in Dennistoun lies a multi-million pound dental lab which is changing the face of the industry.
How it works
A SCANNER is placed inside the mouth to take a video, which is then e-mailed back to the lab technicians.
From there, a model is made by rapid prototyping using nylon material and for the first time, the core of the tooth and the tooth shape can be made at the same time using precise milling techniques.
Dental restorations are produced from a precise drilling process called milling, where raw zirconia – the strongest ceramic known to man – is shaped using computer aided design.
“It’s more precise than a human can make by hand,” said Graham Littlejohn. “But we still need skilled dental technicians to individually stain and customise each tooth.”
Dental Technology Services, a family-run business set up in 1943, is the first laboratory in the UK to use pictures taken inside patients’ mouths with an oral scanner.
DTS, which employs around 90 staff, makes 3000 teeth a month, representing a 65% share of the UK market. It’s the UK’s largest outsourcing centre, manufacturing crowns, bridges and false teeth for more than 300 laboratories across Britain.
The scanner or, to give it its Sunday name, the 3M EPSE Lava Chairside Oral Scanner, replaces the uncomfortable, traditional process dentists have used to take impressions of teeth for restoration purposes.
It means that family and cosmetic dentists wil be able to e-mail pictures directly to the lab for crowns and bridges to be made more accurately, using new materials.
Read Full Article…How Glasgow Changed The Face Of Dentistry (from Evening Times).
Short URL: http://www.cosmeticdentistsnews.com/?p=1531
Posted by
This is amazing. I saw it in action in New York.